


Chicken Soup for the Undead Soul

by SyllableFromSound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Chicken Soup, Cooking, Cooking Lessons, Domestic Fluff, Family Fluff, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Sibling Bonding, Sick Character, Sickfic, i just think lup & kravitz's relationship is neat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25197361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyllableFromSound/pseuds/SyllableFromSound
Summary: "'Alright, I'm here to make chicken soup and accidentally scorch your petunias,' she said, 'and I've already...well, sorry about that.'"This is...bonding? Kravitz thinks this is bonding. (Taako gets sick and Lup and Kravitz cook for him idk what else you need to know. T for safety. Originally for the tumblr prompt "I told you you'd get sick.)
Relationships: Kravitz & Lup (The Adventure Zone), Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Lup & Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 116





	Chicken Soup for the Undead Soul

As was her wont, Lup called, "Anyone home," didn't wait for a response, and then phased into the house through the two inches of wood. Kravitz stopped, then set the lamp he was holding back into the box of baby blue packing peanuts. He waited for the smell of burning living room curtain to reach his nose. Luckily, it didn't, this time. 

She floated in the foyer and looked around in a confident, surveying manner, skeletal hands on her hypothetical hips, as though he weren't standing right in front of her. "Alright, I'm here to make chicken soup and accidentally scorch your petunias," she said, "and I've already...well, sorry about that."

Those had been purchased and planted hardly four days prior, but Kravitz didn't remark on that. "Lup. You don't know how glad I am you're here." 

She gave a congenial little shrug, causing the flames that rose from her shoulders to shiver upwards before falling again. "Well, hope I didn't keep you waiting. How's Taako?" The question came out quickly. It was particularly relevant today, but it was also one of the first things she asked every time she came in. "That doofus had better be sleeping."

"He's trying upstairs, I think. Not that I would get my hopes up."

"'Trying?'"

"Yes." Kravitz waited. The black, featureless face inside her red hood stayed fixed on him, and she did not carry on the conversation as he'd hoped she would. It seemed that she wanted more from him. "Well...well, I think it's hard for him. He hasn't slept once in the time that I've known him, or in the past decade at all, as far as he's told me. I'm sure he's out of practice if all he does is Trance."

"Oh! Right, right," she said. There was a beat, and then it passed. In the same tone that she'd had when she'd first floated in, she continued, "Well, whatever. He's lucky he's capable of lying in a bed at all."

"Ha, yes," Kravitz said, right before he said nothing. For a few moments that felt too long and vaguely sweaty to him, he stared at Lup, and presumably she stared back, in spite of the fact that he couldn't tell where her eyes were. Her spectral form bobbed slightly up and down in the air, and flames with dark red centers licked off the char-black bones of her hands, and suddenly he was rather glad she always knocked rather than, say, floating up through the floor unannounced when she felt like it. And now the silence was decidedly awkward. He pushed aside one of several unopened cardboard boxes with his foot. "Um, it's his own fault, really. Taako's been spending all his time trying to unpack and organize the house at the same time he's getting things organized to start his school. It's no wonder he's fallen ill--"

"Language." He turned to face her when she piped up. "Just say 'got sick.' No one says 'fall ill' anymore."

He couldn't quite hold back his grimace. 

"Hey, you were the one who asked me to correct you when you talked like an old geezer."

This was true. It was also true, he was sure, that she enjoyed chastising him for a change, when normally he was the one telling her what to do during reaper training. He moved on. "Anyway, like I said, I'm glad I have you here to help now."

"Everything going alright so far."

"Yes. Well, I think so. I pre-salted the chicken, like you said. It's been waiting for five hours." 

"That'll do. We can start on the broth. So how about the seasonings I told you to get? Did you pick up the rosemary?"

"Yes."

"And the parsley?"

"Two teaspoons of dried."

"And the oregano?"

He screeched to a stop, balked. There was no way. He had double- and triple-checked the list she had given him. He couldn't have missed anything. Could he have missed anything? He didn't know anything about cooking, but Taako always said something about the balance of flavors, and what if he'd just pulled a playing card out from the middle of the tower--

She laughed. "I'm fucking with you. Lighten up, dude." She attempted to pat him on the shoulder as she floated past him into the kitchen. Her hand passed right through him a couple times, but eventually she hard enough to make contact. Sometimes she spent a lot of time trying to touch corporeal things. Maybe that was how she'd burned the flowers. "Anyway, who's gonna use oregano when you've already got a buttload of rosemary in there? Come on."

But that was what he was here for today, to be her hands. According to her, there was precious little room for error when making this soup if they wanted to do it The Right Way, no leeway for her to accidentally drop in too much celery or pepper. There was precious little room for error, Kravitz reminded himself as he followed her instructions to strip the chicken meat from the bones. 

"I bought a few different kinds of noodles, since I wasn't sure what was best," he said. "There's those twisty egg noodles, thin pasta, the flat ones--"

"Flat," Lup answered rather like a patient schoolteacher, "and don't break them up when you put them in the soup. He'll slurp them up one-by-one when no one's watching, but he'll never admit that."

"Right." He wanted to say, _I knew that._ He didn't exactly know, not from experience, and yet it was the kind of thing he'd expected from Taako. He felt like he didn't have to be told.

"That comes later, though," she said. "The noodles cook separately, and it doesn't take long."

"Oh. Alright." 

"We used to make the noodles from scratch back on the ship and save them for rainy days, but store-bought's gonna have to do. Hey, do you have a pepper mill?"

"A what?"

"You know, for grinding up fresh-cracked pepper. Taako likes a lot of it."

Kravitz thought. "I think Taako does, but it might be in storage." He clumsily tried to get his nails under the papery skin of a garlic bulb, trying to peel it off. "Did he tell you he likes it fresh-ground better?"

Lup cocked her head a little. "I don't think he told me, per se. He just...well, he always used to like it that way, at least."

He nodded, stiffly. Then he continued nodding through a litany of other questions and corrections from her, about keeping the skin on the onions when he puts them in and how often he'll need to skim the fat from the top of the broth and how to extract the flavor from the bones and how much anise to add. There was a temptation to remark that he could, in fact, operate a stove. But he would say this for her: for someone who came across as so impulsive sometimes, she was surprisingly fastidious when it came to cooking. She knew everything about this dish. About what Taako liked about it. Given that he didn't feel hunger and as such hadn't done much in the way of cooking for hundreds of years, he had little choice but to listen to her. Although it would be nice if she could stop instructing him long enough for him to try to absorb what he was doing, so that he could remember all these details himself, for the next time Taako got sick.

He was so busy trying to keep up with her that he barely registered it when she abruptly switched to praise. "You're not half-bad, Skele-friend." 

"Huh?" he responded, all dignity. "Oh, well, I'm just doing what you tell me. Or trying to."

"Yeah, well, you're doing a good job of it. Especially since you haven't taken orders from anyone less than a goddess for, what, a few centuries?"

"And you haven't made this recipe in quite some time. It's incredible how well you remember it."

She paused. "Taako's the one who always used to make it, actually," she murmured. "I'd be the helper. Unless I was the one who was sick. Then he'd do it himself. I feel like it's about time I returned the favor."

Kravitz couldn't keep from grinning at the thought. "I had a feeling he'd be a caring older brother."

"He's not my older brother. We're twins."

"Who's older, though?"

"Neither, we were born at the same time!"

"So you're the younger one."

She attempted to give him a playful shove. "Of course you'd take his side," she said in an exaggerated grumble. "I suppose you've had siblings?"

"Yes," he said quietly. He returned to stirring and said nothing else. Mercifully, she got the hint. After a moment, she materialized a white wand of sharpened bone into her hand (one of Barry's ulnas that he'd gifted to her, she'd told Kravitz once, which...said something about their relationship, alright). He watched her point it into the broth. 

His side-eye must have been more obvious than he'd suspected, because she huffed when she caught sight of him staring. For someone whose face was little more than a black void with an ember-like glow of red at the center, she could give quite the eye-roll. "Relax, Mr. Death Cop. It's healing magic." She stopped for a moment, apparently to judge whether she could push her luck. "Though, you know, necromancy is hardly different from the stuff clerics do every day."

"I'm no great arcanist, Lup. I just take down cultists. And you know that whether or not clerics do it doesn't matter to the Raven Queen. Whether it's Vampiric Touch or Revivify, it's still a corruption of fate."

"Alright, spare me the speech, please. I'm just saying," she said with another shrug. "I am an arcanist, and I can tell you that it's the same kind of magical energy to heal or hurt, just flowing in different directions."

There had been an eon when he had felt that as opposed to simply knowing it, back before he'd had a scythe or a home in the Astral Plane. When he could ease his mother's headaches with a song. 

"Shit," she shouted out of nowhere, and simultaneously, blue flames from the gas burners shot up suddenly. Kravitz scrambled for the heat dials. "Shit, wait, I just remembered something."

"What is it? Did we forget something?"

"Doesn't everything he eat taste like Gogurt now?" Her voice began to pitch up a little, grow strained. "What if he can't even taste the soup?"

"It's okay, Lup," he responded before she could go on. "I've asked him about that. He said soup doesn't count for the curse. He'll be able to taste it."

"Oh." She sounded as though she'd let out a sigh of relief, though she lacked lungs. "Okay, I just wasn't sure. Magnus had to tell me that, you know. I wouldn't have even known Taako was cursed otherwise."

Kravitz glanced her way. "Does that bother you?"

"It's not like he has to tell me," she said quickly. Then she hesitated, which, as far as he had learned, was not characteristic. She could be patient, but not hesitant, not unassured. "It's just weird that I...don't already know, I guess. I've just--you'll want a chef's knife for that."

"Which one is--?" 

"Curved blade. And it's easier if you don't move the knife back and forth. Just pass the carrot under the blade while you chop." She sighed. "Anyway, I just missed things. A lot."

Kravitz bit his lip. "Well...you still know him like no one else. You realize that, don't you? I feel like I'm playing catch-up with all the rest of you. You all had a hundred years to figure him out. And you in particular had quite a few more."

"You're not doing too bad on that front already, bud." He could have sworn he saw a smile peek out from under the hood. He didn't recall her ever calling him "bud" before. "Not from what Taako's told me, anyway." 

He stopped stirring the wooden spoon through the golden fluid for awhile. "I guess it's good you'll be moving in with us before too long, huh? We can bring each other up to speed."

"Listen, this shit's gonna be done before long. Why don't you take it up to him yourself?"

Kravitz looked her way. "You sure? It's your soup. You don't want to come up with me?"

"I'll see him plenty later. I'm sure I will." 

Minutes later, he was knocking on the door of Taako's bedroom--their shared bedroom, now, with a new king-sized bed and mattress. There were a few instances of throat-clearing before Kravitz heard a croak of "Come in."

He pushed through the door, steaming bowl in both hands. "Hey, darling, have you slept at all?"

"Can't sleep at the best of times, babe." Taako followed up the answer with a snort. "This cold's some bullshit."

He chuckled. "I told you you'd get sick if you kept working like you've been."

"Can it, Bone-Hands McGee." He sat up and struggled to sniff some air through his stuffed nose. "Hey, is that--?"

"Lup helped." He lifted his shoulders in a way that he hoped would come across as self-effacing, as if the soup in his hands didn't smell like absolute heaven. 

"That so?" He wiped his nose with a tissue, though not before Kravitz saw the blush creep into his warm cheeks. He saw that blush a lot, and always just at the moment that the two of them met eyes. Each time was a gift, whether Taako meant to give it to him or not. "Let's give it a whirl then."

Kravitz sat next to him on the bed and watched the whole while as Taako held the bowl under his nose, let the steam waft up into his sinuses, tipped his head back to show his smooth neck and closed his eyes and drank the broth slowly. Then he licked his lips abruptly and said, "Not bad for someone who considers fancy wine to be an entire meal. Hey, get out of my bed of contagion. You're the one who's gonna get sick next."

He chuckled and ran a hand through Taako's already pillow-ruffled hair. "That's the nice thing about being dead already, sweetheart. I can't get sick." To prove the point, he kissed his cheek.

He kept doing it, in fact, as he and Taako sat together and as the soup was slowly consumed. He hummed softly, then sang more so. And a few times, when he touched his lips to his boyfriend's skin, he tried to dredge up the kind of magic that he hadn't hadn't used for centuries, for the majority of his life. Not since he'd been alive. It felt far different from the kind he used to electrocute or grapple a necromantic cultist, and at first it felt like trying to run water through a pipe that hadn't seen a drop in decades. But he felt the warmth of the magic like he felt the vibration of his vocal chords, energy coming from deep inside of him, from nothing. Taako seemed to breathe more easily as the Healing Word took effect. 

It was after the bowl had been sitting empty for awhile that Kravitz felt Taako's breathing slow next to him and take on the rhythm not of meditation, but of sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Ayyy what's up! Here's another one originally from tumblr that I decided to edit and throw on here. Not much to say about it except that it's nice to finally have a Taakitz fic on AO3 lmao. I love it when these two get domestic and I love Lup getting all up in their business even more.
> 
> Thanks for reading and please leave a comment if you care to!


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